Does building a new transit line trigger ridership? Does it even make sense to talk about the ridership of a piece of transit infrastructure?

If you say yes, you're expressing an infrastructurist world-view that is common in transit investment discussions. The right answer to the above questions, of course, is "No, but:

Infrastructure permits the operation of some kind of useful transit service, which consists of vehicles running with a certain speed, frequency, reliabilty, civility and a few other variables.

That service triggers ridership."

To the infrastructurist, this little term -- "service" -- is a mere pebble in a great torrent of causation that flows from infrastructure to ridership. By contrast, service planners, and most transit riders that I've ever met, insist that service is the whole point of the infrastructure.

If you read the literature of infrastructure analysis, you encounter the infrastructurist world view all the time, mostly in ways that's unconscious on the authors' part but still a source of confusion. This afternoon I was browsing TCRP 167, "Making Effective Fixed-Guideway Transit Investments: Indicators of Success", which includes some really useful explorations of land use factors affecting the success of transit lines. But when they talked about infrastructure features as causes of ridership, the report routinely delivered weirdness like this:

The percentage of the project’s alignment that is at grade proved to be a negative indicator of project-level ridership. At-grade projects may be more prevalent in places that are lower in density, while transit is more likely to be grade-separated in places with higher density or land value. Thus, this indicator may be reflective of density. It may also be true that at-grade systems are slower than grade-separated systems. At-grade status may reflect a bundle of operational characteristics such as speed, frequency, and reliability, although the analysis did not find that these factors individually had a statistically significant effect on ridership. [TCRP 167, 1-17]

This careful talk about how a correlation "may" reflect density or "operational features" sounds vague and speculative when it's actually very easy to establish. There is no shortage of evidence that:

High density reliably triggers ridership.

Areas of high density are less likely to have available surface rights of way.

Therefore, highest ridership segments tend to be grade-separated.

So this is a case where "A correlates with B" does not mean "A causes B" or "B causes A". It means "A and B are both results of common cause C". It's important to know that, because it means you won't get B simply by doing A, which is the way that claims of correlation are usually misunderstood by the media and general public.

Later in the paragraph, the authors again describe the obvious as a mystery:

At grade status may reflect a bundle of operational characteristics such as speed, frequency, and reliability ...

Yes, it certainly may, but rather than lumping all the at-grade rail projects together, they could have observed whether each one actually does.

... although the analysis did not find that these factors [speed, frequency, and reliability] individually had a statistically significant effect on ridership

While this dataset of new infrastructure projects is too small and noisy to capture the relationship of speed, frequency, and reliability to ridership, the vastly larger dataset of the experience of transit service knows these factors to be overwhelming. What's more, we can describe the mechanism of the relationship, instead of just observing correlations: Speed, frequency, and reliability are the main measures of whether you reach your destination on time. Given this, the burden of proof should certainly be on those who suggest that ridership is possibly unrelated to whether a service is useful for that purpose.

Note the word choice: To the infrastructurist, speed, frequency and reliability are dismissed as operational, whereas I would call them fundamental. To the transit customer who wants to get where she's going, these "operational" variables are the ones that determine whether, or when, she'll get there. It doesn't matter whether the line is at-grade or underground; it matters whether the service achieves a certain speed and reliability, and those design features are one small element in what determines that.

I deliberately chose a TCRP example because the authors of specific passages are not identified, and I have no interest in picking on any particular author. Rather, my point is that infrastructurism so pervasive; I hear it all the time in discussions of transit projects.

I wonder, also, if infrastructurism is a motorist's error: In the world of roads, the infrastructure really is the cause of most of the outcomes; if you come from that world it's easy to miss how profoundly different transit is in this respect, and how different the mode of analysis must be to address transit fairly.

Whenever you hear someone talk about the ridership of a piece of infrastructure, remember: Transit infrastructure can't get people to their destinations. Only transit service can. So study the service, not just the infrastructure!

I'll be leery of Toronto Star interviews in the future, because I explained my view carefully and that's not how it came out:

Jarrett Walker and Rob Ford (see Rob Ford’s policard) don’t have much in common. One is an Oregon-based transit consultant, the other Toronto’s chief magistrate. One blogs avidly, the other disdains the media. Whereas Ford rails against the “war on the car,” Walker touts the virtues of buses.

But on one issue, at least, the policy wonk and the conservative politician agree: streetcars are overrated. Walker is decisively on one side of a new debate in the U.S., over whether the trendy form of rail transport springing up in American cities makes practical sense.

My actual view is too long for a soundbite but should not have been too long for an article. My view is that streetcars mixed with private car traffic are overrated. I was very clear with the reporter that all of my critiques of the US streetcar revival movement are about streetcars in mixed traffic. In the Toronto context, I specifically distinguished between the old downtown Toronto mixed traffic streetcars, which are nearly inoperable due to traffic impacts, and Toronto's exclusive-lane light rail segments such as Spadina and St. Clair. None of my concerns about streetcars apply to the latter.

Here's the bottom line. Streetcars are just a tool. They can be used in smart ways and in stupid ways. Asking a transit planner for an opinion about a transit techology is like asking a carpenter what his favorite tool is. A good carpenter sees his tools as tools and chooses the right one for the task at hand. He doesn't use his screwdriver to pound nails just because he is a "screwdriver advocate" or "hammer opponent". Yet the Toronto Star assumes that nobody involved in transit debates is as smart as your average competent carpenter.

To call me a streetcar advocate or opponent, you are imposing on me your own assumption that the bus-rail debate is the most important conversation about transit. This is the Toronto Star's assumption, but it's not mine. In fact, my work is about blowing up that assumption, and suggesting that instead of falling in love with vehicles, wires, and propulsion systems, we might consider falling in love with the freedom to get where you're going.

I don't have time to respond to everything that gets published on transit, but Robert Steuteville's must-read piece today on the Congress for the New Urbanism blog, which explains why we should invest in transit that's slower than walking*, certainly deserves a response.

I admire and respect Robert, and I think his "place mobility" concept is quite sensible. Indeed, one can argue that the first and most powerful rung on the transportation "efficiency" ladder is to ensure that destinations are within walking/bicycling distance wherever possible, obviating the need for cars and transit in the first place, in turn freeing up the latter two for long-distance travel. But after the "place mobility" concept, I think the article begins to fall apart.

It seems to me that it's easy to romanticize slow transit if you don't have to rely on it all the time. With all due respect, I get the impression that many "streetcar tourists" use transit only occasionally when visiting a new city, or perhaps to go to a ball game, but for little else. And I get it: if much of your day-to-day travel is characterized by routinized, featureless car trips between work, shopping, meetings, and whatnot, I can see the allure in taking a break to relax and 'go slow,' as it were.

But the romantic impulse towards slow transit wears away quickly if you have no choice but to rely on it all the time! I don't have a car, so I rely on buses that travelexcruciatingly slowly, wasting much of my time. (I have, for example, learned to pad an hour between meetings and appointments in different parts of town, simply because the mixed-traffic transit takes so long to get from A to B to C.) So, rather than viewing slow transit as an opportunity to unwind and watch the street life pass by, I see it as a precious-free-time-gobbler.

I love to be immersed in street life when I'm walking, but when I inevitably need to travel beyond walking distance, I want to get there quickly. Does this make me a so-called "speed freak?" If so, wouldn't all the urban designers out there praising slow transit for others - while they hurriedly shuttle from charrette to public input meeting to office to daycare in their cars - be "speed freaks" too? The reality is that most of us - walkers, bicyclists, drivers, and transit riders alike - are "speed freaks" most of the time, simply because we prefer minimizing travel time and dedicating our precious free time to friends and family.

And this gets back to "place mobility:" it is great when many daily necessities - the grocery store, the bank, the library, the elementary school - are within walking distance. But - and this perhaps reveals a conceptual flaw in New Urbanism - not every place can or should be a self-contained "village." As Jane Jacobs argued, the whole point of cities is to offer rich opportunity - opportunity that requires travel beyond whatever a "village" can offer: "Planning theory is committed to the ideal of supposedly cozy, inwardly-turned city neighborhoods. [But] city people aren't stuck with the provincialism of a neighborhood, and why should they be – isn't wide choice and rich opportunity the point of cities? (Death and Life, 115-116)."

For example, I may be fortunate enough to have a daycare center on my block, but perhaps I want to send my kids to a magnet or private school across town - a school better than my neighborhood school? So would my kids rather wake up at 5am to take a streetcar sitting in traffic to get to school, or wake up at 7am to take a faster subway or a bus on a bus lane? I may be fortunate enough to have a pharmacy on my block too, but what if the doctor I trust is across town? Would I rather take the whole day off from work to take a streetcar sitting in traffic and delayed by a poorly-parked car to get there, or could I take a half-day by taking the subway or the crosstown express bus? For better or worse, there will always be long-distance destinations, and I suspect transit riders will continue to prioritize speed for these trips.

As for the short, local trips made possible by "place mobility," I still wonder whether mixed-traffic streetcars are the best bang for the buck. Yes, they are a placemaking tool, but they're not the only (or the cheapest) one. If, as admitted in the article, mixed-traffic streetcars don't particularly offer useful transit, nor are they necessarily the only/best/cheapest placemaking tool, then I have to wonder if 30 years from now we'll look back on them as yet another expensive urban renewal fad. (American cities are still littered with half-dead "game changing" fads from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.) We ultimately need rapid transit and "place mobility," but mixed-traffic streetcars are hardly a prerequisite for creating the latter.

So far I've hesitated voicing these opinions to fellow urbanists because I don't want to alienate any friends, but I'm increasingly skeptical of the streetcar fervor. Given that (A) mixed-traffic streetcars are simply slower and less-flexible than mixed-traffic buses, and (B) that the benefits that are packaged with properly-prioritized streetcars (dedicated lanes, signal priority, durable shelters, etc.) could just as easily be packaged with buses, I wonder if the streetcar fervor is an example of simple "technograndiosity." At the end of the day, I'd rather have ten bus lines reaching twenty useful places than one streetcar line reaching two useful places.

*Most new streetcars in the US have average scheduled speeds of 6-10 mph, a jogging or running speed for able-bodied adults. However, actual travel time (compared to a private vehicle alternative) includes the average wait time. Most US streetcars are not very frequent (usually in the 15-20 minute range) given the short trips that they serve, so it is the high wait time, combined with the very slow ride, that makes them slower than walking. Again, this calculation describes the experience of an ordinary working person who needs to get places on time, not the tourist or flaneur for whom delay is another form of delight.

Transportation planning is full of projections -- a euphemism meaning predictions. Generally, when we need a euphemism, it means we may be accommodating a bit of denial about something.

Predicting the future, at a time when so many things seem to be changing in nonlinear ways, is a pretty audacious thing to do. There are professions whose job it is to do this, and we pay them a lot to give us predictions that sound like facts. I have the highest respect for them (all the more because what they do is nearly impossible) but only when they speak in ways that honor the limitations of their tools.

Good transportation planning does this. at the very least, it talks about future scenarios rather than predictions, often carrying multiple scenarios of how the future could vary. Scenarios are still predictions, though; they're just hedged predictions, where we place several bets in hope that one will be right.

I will never forget the first time that I presented a proposed transit plan and was told: "that's an interesting idea; we'll have to see how it performs." The speaker didn't mean "let's implement it and see what happens." He meant, "let's see what our predictive model says." You know you're inside a silo when people talk about prediction algorithms as though they are the outcome, not just a prediction of the outcome that is only as good as the assumptions on which it's built.

Something really important happened in the US around 2004, which experts call the "VMT Inflection." Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US -- the total volume of driving -- departed from a linear growth path that it had followed for decades, and went flat. Here's the same curve looking further back. Around 2003, you could be forgiven for thinking that this steady slope was something we could count on.

(At this point an ecologist or economist will point out that the VMT inflection shouldn't have been a surprise at all. This graph looks like what a lot of systems do when their growth runs into a capacity or resource limit. The VMT inflection is a crowdsourced signal that the single-occupant car is hitting a limit of that kind.)

So reality changed, but the Federal projections didn't. Even as late as 2008, when the new horizontal path had been going for four years, Federal projections claimed that the growth in driving would immediately return to the previous fast-rising slope. Again:

This isn't prediction or projection. This is denial.

All predictions rest on the assumption that the future is like the past. Professional modelers assume their predictive algorithms are accurate if they accurately predict past or current events -- a process called calibration. This means that all such prediction rests on a bedrock idea that human behavior in the future, and the background conditions against which decisions are made, will all be pretty much unchanged, except for the variables that are under study.

In other words, as I like to say to Millennials: the foundation of orthodox transportation planning is our certainty that when you're the same age as your parents are now, you'll behave exactly the way they do.

We describe historical periods as "dark" or "static" when that assumption is true. Over the centuries of the European Middle Ages or Ancient Egypt, everyone acted like their parents did, so nothing ever seemed to change except accidents of war and the name of the king or pharaoh. Our transportation modeling assumes that ours is such an age.

Historical progress arises from people making different choices than their parents did, and there seems to be a lot of this happening now.

What we urgently need, in this business, are predictions that try to quantify how the future is not like the past; for example, by studying Millennial behavior and preferences and exploring what can reasonably be asserted about a world in which Millennials are in their 50s and are in the position to define what is normal, just as their parents and grandparents do today.

We already know that the future is curved. (With rare exceptions like the growth of VMT from 1970 to 2004, the past has been curvy as well). Millennials are not like their parents were at the same age. There will be major unpredictable shocks. There are many possible valid predictions for such a future. The one that we can be sure is wrong is the straight line.

My work on Abundant Access -- part of the emerging world of accessibility studies -- is precisely about providing a different way to talk about transportation outcomes that people can believe in and care about. It means carefully distinguishing facts from predictions, and valuing things that people have always cared about -- like getting places on time and having the freedom to go many places -- from human tastes that change more rapidly -- such as preferences and attitudes about transit technologies. It's a Socratic process of gently challenging assumptions. Ultimately, it's part of the emerging science of resilience thinking, extending that ecological metaphor to human societies. It posits that while the future can't be predicted there are still ways of acting rightly in the face of the range of likely possibilities.

Imagine planning without projections. What would that look like? How would we begin?

I should not have taken the phone call from LA Weekly. As soon as the reporter said that he wanted to probe "why so few white people ride transit in LA", I should have said no, I will not give any more oxygen to the divisive and pointless conversation that the question is trying to encourage. I had already given the factual answer to that question in my article on "bus stigma" in the Atlantic Citylab, and I should have simply referred the reporter, Chris Walker, there.

"There is no reason to believe that Angelenos are irrational about their transportation choices. ... I believe a transportation system is reflective of its usefulness. The focus should be on making a more useful system. Do that, and [increased] diversity will be a side effect."

Walker argues that the way to get bigger ridership more reflective of Los Angeles is to increase density along L.A.'s transit lines: add special transit lanes for buses (as the city is currently creating on Wilshire Boulevard) and push for transit-oriented developments (TODs) that feature high-density buildings filled with offices and housing near the major transit routes.

According to Jarrett Walker, a designer of transportation systems for a number of big cities, the Los Angeles bus system is designed in a way that offers better service to non-white Angelenos. No one uses the word racism, but the dog whistles in this clinical explanation will chill your spine:

But Jarrett Walker, who has designed transportation systems in multiple cities, says stigma and social standing are not what's keeping L.A.'s white folks in their cars.

In a blog post, he points out that white residents are more likely to live in low-density areas where bus service is not common or practical. Meanwhile, the population of the area served by Metro is well over 70 percent people of color, "which means that the number of white bus riders is not far off what we should expect."

What say we just stop with the word games, Los Angeles.

" And fancy language like "the number of white bus riders is not far off what we should expect" is just another way of screaming "honky."

What can one say? Well, this:

This is transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker, author of the book Human Transit and the blog humantransit.org. The author of this post clearly knows nothing about my work, though he could have looked me up easily enough, and like many race-obsessed folks he seems to know nothing about the law of supply and demand, or the nature of how organizations succeed.

Like any organization that seeks any kind of success, including every private business, transit in LA tries to respond to the demand for its product. It does this by focusing on areas where the nature of development makes it easy for transit to succeed. It's a mathematical fact that transit is more useful in places where density is high, the local street network is well-connected, and where walking is easy. If white people in LA are more likely to live in areas that are not like this, transit is not being racist in not serving them.

You know what I love about LA? It's way less obsessed with race than its media is. I suspect most Angelenos would never have asked how many white people ride the bus, because it's not an interesting question. As a white person I couldn't care less, and most of the white people I know couldn't care less. LA's prosperity arises from people working together, and getting where they're going together. Racial resentments get in the way of that.

Conservatives need to chose between their commitment to ethnic resentments and their commitment to prosperity. In an age of global collaboration, you can't have both.

I can now imagine a horde of commenters saying: "You're giving the merchants of hatred too much attention, Jarrett. Breitbart News deserves to be ignored." Yes, they do, but when ethnic hatemongering gets as much attention as Breitbart News does, there has to be a response on the record, and now there is.

The "tea party" US House members who currently dominate the news are unlikely allies of urbanists. But on one core idea, a band of urbanist thinkers are starting to echo a key idea of the radical right: Big and active national government may not be the answer.

Last week, I was honored to be invited to Citylab, a two-day gathering in New York City sponsored by the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic magazine, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The event featured mayors and civic policy leaders from both North America and overseas as well as leading academics, journalists, and consultants.

I expected the thrilling mix of new ideas, compelling stories, and quirky characters, but I got one thing I didn't expect: A full-throated demand, from several surprising voices, for an urbanist revolt against the power of national governments.

Al Gore said it with his trademark fusion of bluntness and erudition: "The nation-state," he said, "is becoming disintermediated." If you're not an academic at heart, that means: "National governments are becoming irrelevant to urban policy, and hence to the economy of an urban century."

On cue, the New York Times published an op-ed on "The End of the Nation-State," about how cities are leaving nations behind. Citylab also featured a terrific interview with political scientist Benjamin Barber, whose new book If Mayors Ruled the World argues for the irrelevance of nation-states in a world where cities are the real levers of economic power. (According to Barber, the full title of his book should have been: If Mayors Ruled the World: Why They Should and How They Already Do.) When I spoke with Barber later, looking for nuance, he was full-throated in ridiculing the US Federal role in urbanism. On this view, all the well-intentioned money that the Federal government doles out for urban goodies should be spent by cities as they see fit, or perhaps (gasp) never sent to Washington at all.

Follow this logic and you might arrive at a radical urban Federalism, perhaps even one that could meet tea-party demands to "Abolish the IRS!" Pay taxes to your city or state, and let them send a bit of it on to central government to do the few things that only a central government can do. Push power downward to the scale where problems can be solved.

You might even separate urban from rural governance in a way that enables both to thrive, each at its proper scale, replacing the eternal struggle between these necessary opposites that makes today's political discourse so inane. The "size of government" debate is just a pointless and eternal struggle between urban and rural experience, both of which are right. Living in cities means relying on government for many things that the rural resident provides for herself, so of course the attitude toward government is different. But what's really logically different is the role of local government. Both urban and rural experience provide good reason to be suspicious of big-yet-distant national government, which can be as unresponsive to big-city mayors as it is to a Wyoming county official who just needs to get a bridge fixed.

At most of the urbanist and transportation conferences that I attend, though, any shrinking the national government role is met with horror. And that's understandable.

In the US, the prevailing local response to declining federal spending is outrage and redoubled advocacy. In Australia or Canada, two countries I work in extensively, working urbanists and infrastructure advocates seem to agree that of course there must be a bigger central government role in everything, with the US often cited as the model. In the US itself, it's easy to see the current cuts in Federal spending as a disaster for urbanism and infrastructure. It is, but it could also be something else: an invitation to governments that are closer to the people to have their own conversations that lead to local consensus about funding and solutions.

If mayors do end up ruling the world, it will be because the city, unlike the state or nation, is where citizenship is mostly deeply felt. A nation's problems are abstract; if they show up in your life you're more likely to think of them as your community's or city's problems. And that, in short, is why the city may be best positioned to actually build consensus around solving problems, including consensus about raising and spending money.

And yet ...

Before urbanists join the tea partiers in trying to shrink the national government, they have to grapple with the problem of inequality. As sites of concentrated opportunity, cities are attracting the poor as well as the rich, and are thus becoming the place where inequality is most painfully evident. But no mayor can be expected to solve a problem that exists on such a scale.

In small-c conservative terms, of course, the problem is not income inequality but rather the declining credibility of a "ladder of opportunity" that convinces everyone that reasonable effort will improve their circumstances. One reason to care about transit, walking, and cycling -- for many points on the income spectrum -- is that transportation can form such a formidable barrier to opportunity.

All through Citylab, hands were wrung about inequality and the need to Do Something about it, against the backdrop of a New York City mayoral election that is mostly about this issue. A rent control debate, featuring New York City Planning Director Amanda Burden and economist Paul Romer, found no middle ground on the question of whether city policy can usefully intervene to help low income people. Income inequality appeared to be one issue where cities can do little by themselves.

When I asked sociologist Richard Florida about this in the North American context, he pointed me to an article proposing that the US create a Department of Cities. He has good ideas about how to keep this from being just another bureaucracy, but if income inequality is the big issue that only national policy can address, it's not clear that it should be tagged as an urban issue at all. Cities are not where the problems are. Cities are just where people see their society's problems most intensely in daily life, because they get out of their cars.

The great city in the wealthy parts of the world cannot just be an enclave of success. It will deserve the self-government that the mayors seek only if it relentlessly inspires, supports, and gives back to its suburban and rural hinterland, creating its own "ladder of opportunity" for access to the riches of urban life. Only a few people can afford Manhattan or San Francsico, so those cities' money and expertise must focus not just on themselves but on making life in more affordable places incrementally more humane. Turning Newark into Manhattan would just make it unaffordable, so some of the urgency must lie in less photogenic intervention that works for each place's price-point. It lies in providing safe places to walk and cycle, and a safe way to cross the street at every bus stop, even in landscapes of drive-through everything that will be what many people can afford, and what some prefer.

That's why I'm happy to be working not just in San Francisco but also in Houston, where affordability is a leading selling point. It's why I'm suspicious of transit planning that defines an elite "choice rider" as the only important customer, including much of the transit-aestheticism that comes out of urbanist academia. Where are the prestigious awards for the best affordable, scalable, but nonsexy intervention that made low-income inner-ring suburbia more safe and functional? How do we build not just the shining city behind a moat (San Francisco, Manhattan, Singapore) but a chain of humane and functional places, at every price-point, that combine safety, civility and opportunity?

Where is the money in that? If mayors ruled the world, I hope that would be obvious. So let's hope they already do.

“To live sanely in Los
Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate
the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the
unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the
newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what
you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink
and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for
you – from the cradle to the grave and beyond – which it would be easy, fatally
easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of
your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant,
the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake
up – before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really
want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that
won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free
will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite
rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if
you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the
other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

Now and then I think of an aphorism that's so self evident that surely some guru must have said it by now. Perhaps someone did before 1990, but Google finds nothing for "cynicism is consent."

So I'll say it. Cynicism is consent.

I know I've just offended millions of proud cynics, but it's true. I deal all the time with the cynicism of activists and am sometimes accused of idealism when I complain about something.

As a consultant with 20 years under my belt in this business, I have also seen enough of "what really goes on behind closed doors" that if I wanted to be cynical, I'd be way more qualified than most folks to back it up.

Currently I'm having a small, polite dust-up with the Cincinnati Enquirer about a false headline on a story today. I don't link because by the time you read this, it will probably have been corrected. I'll post on that issue and its lessons soon.

When I tweeted about it, I got this tweet from a leading urbanist thinker whom I very much admire:

"You expect a headline writer to understand subtlety? Hah!"

To which my response is: Not unless I force them to.

I had the same problem with another Cincinnati publication, the website of the local ABC affiliate, a day earlier. Several people complained about a misleading headline on an article about my visit, and they changed it, fast.

I cannot begin to describe how much better public transit would be if people who feel cynical about it would complain constructively instead of languishing in the dead-end of cynicism. And yes, you have to do it over and over. Patiently.

As with many issues, public transit in America is neglected because of apathy, not opposition. The opponents are not the problem. The apathy of supporters is. And cynicism is a big part of that apathy.

Cynicism often dresses itself up as wisdom and worldliness.

But when you assume the worst instead of patiently, constructively pointing out error, you are consenting.

Here's a very worthwhile three minutes of Washington DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning on risk-taking and failure. Her discussion of Capital Bikeshare, which failed in its first incarnation and succeeded in its second, is an incisive challenge to the bureaucratic mind, and it's directly related to transit improvements.

Whenever we try to improve transit systems, we often find -- especially in network redesign -- that a whole lot of big changes have to be made at once. What's more, they're irreversible. Network redesigns are so big and impactful that you can't just "try" them and undo them if they don't work. By the time you've done them, the previous status quo is irrecoverable.

So they're big risks. And most people -- especially most groups of people working together such as Boards and committees -- don't like to take risks. The deliberation process in government often seems designed to shrink every initiative, so that all strong transformative moves shrivel into hesitant "demonstration projects," if they survive at all.

Tregoning's story here is basically that the first bikeshare system failed because it was too small, too hesitant, while the second one succeeded because it was far bigger, bolder, riskier. Many of the government cultures I've known would have decided, based on the first round, never to try bikeshare again. It took courage to say that maybe the lesson was that some things just can't be done as tiny demonstration projects. You have to build the courage to actually do them, at the natural scale at which they start to work.

Transit network redesign is exactly like that. It's hard to do in hesitant, reversible phases, because it's all so interconnected, and because a network doesn't start to work until it's all there.

In Latin, Brown said, “eco” means house. As an example, “economy” means “rules of the house.” “Logos” means “lord, god, or the deep principles or patterns of nature.” So “ecology is more fundamental than economics. Economics sits within ecology. Not the other way around."

You've seen photos like this. A large group of people, with images comparing the amount of precious urban space they take depending on the mode of transport they use. This new one is by Australia's Cycling Promotion Fund.

This photo makes at least three important points, two of them probably not intended. In this one image you can see that:

Bike racks on buses (and most other transit) can never be more than a niche market.

The rack on the bus in pic #1 carries two bikes, which is great for those two people. But if all the bikes in pic #2 try to get onto the bus in pic #1, we have a geometric impossibility. Bike racks are already as large as they can be if the driver is still to be far enough forward to drive safely. A non-folding bike inside a transit vehicle takes the space of several passengers, so could fairly be accommodated only at several times the fare. In the ideal sustainable future, you will have to park your bike at the station, or return your rental bike, just as Europeans do. If transit does accommodate your bike, you really should pay a fare premium that reflects the rough number of passenger spaces displaced, or the supply/demand ratio for 2-3 bike racks vs 20 people wanting to use them.

Dreamers along these lines may well be right about many suburban areas, where demand is sparse and the land use pattern precludes efficient transit. But when all the people in this picture want to travel, driverless cars may take less space than the cars shown here, but they will still take far more space than a bus would. The scarcity of space per person is part of the very definition of a city, as distinct from suburbia or rural area, so the efficiency with which transport options use that space will always be the paramount issue.

(Of course, this very thought experiment presumes that we will actually achieve, and culturally accept, driverless cars that require very little space between them, in which the prevention of ghastly accidents -- especially with pedestrians and bikes who may appear with zero warning and minimal stopping distance -- is achieved through the absolute infallibility of human-designed hardware and software.)

To make the same point more generally:

In cities, urban space is the ultimate currency.

We spend too much time talking about what things cost in dollars and not enough about what they cost in space. That, of course, is because urban space is perversely priced to encourage inefficient uses of it and discourage efficient ones. If you're going to claim to be able to visualize how technology will change the world of 2040 -- as the techno-futurists claim to do -- you should also visualize what a political system ruled by people now under 40 would look like. These people are much less emotionally attached to cars, care about environmental outcomes much more, and value urban space much more than their parents do. Given that the revolution in urban pricing has already begun (see the London and Singapore congestion charges, and the San Francisco and Auckland dynamic parking systems), isn't it foolish to assume that today's assumptions about how we apportion urban space will still rule your techno-utopia?

UPDATE: A reader points out one other key point, which is that

the photo understates the space requirements of bikes compared to the other two.

Once you put these three systems in motion, the cars and bus will need more space in one dimension -- forward and back. However, in motion, the mass of bikes will expand in two dimensions, it will need to be both longer and wider for all the bikes to move safely. This could have been rectified in the photo by consciously spacing the bikes to a distance where riders would feel comfortable at a brisk cycling speed that ensures not only stopping distance but also space for passing. Masses of cyclists on a recreational ride may all agree to ride in tight formation at the same speed, but in daily life cycling infrastructure must accommodate the the fact that people in a cycling crowd will have different desires and intentions around speed, which affects lateral spacing and stopping distance.

Just got home from the Congress for the New Urbanism Transportation Summit, which is trying to formulate transportation policy and advice from a New Urbanist point of view.

Over the last decade, the CNU has made great efforts to form a coherent view on transportation. The organization's core has always been an architecture and urban design perspective that is very much about placemaking, and only secondarily about movement. Much New Urbanism is about slowing everything down in urban environments, and while the goal of increased urban density means that ultimately travel distances are shorter, slower movement can also mean reducing people's ability to get where they're going. For example, much of the idea that transit should be slower (e.g. Patrick Condon, Darrin Nordahl) has roots in early CNU thinking. This in turn can feed the perception (unfair but not totally unfounded) that the pastel people in a New Urbanist rendering are more a hermetic cult of utopians than free actors in a complex society who need to get to meetings on time.

Initially, transportation -- specifically highway engineering -- was CNU's number one enemy, and this conflict still generates some of the best drama. The summit this year featured a conversation between an AASHTO representative -- representing the view of State Departments of Transportation -- and a New Urbanist transport consultant, in which common ground was sought but lines in the sand were clearly drawn on both sides.

So the CNU's efforts at leadership in transportation policy are a very important move. Groups at the conference worked on issues such as cycling, functional street classification (sexier than it sounds), and the conversation of highways to boulevards. I was in the group dealing with transit networks.

We spent much of our time thinking about the mutual incomprehension that plagues the relationship between urban designers and transit planners. This issue is at the climax of my book Human Transit, where I look at famous examples of cases where supposedly transit-oriented developments were located in places where efficient and attractive public transit was geometrically impossible.

Both sides of this incomprehension engage the other too late in the process. As a transit consultant, I can certainly attest that I'm always hired too late to fix a development's transit problems, which were usually locked in at the stage of site selection or conceptual design. I suppose you could say that transit agencies engage development too late, though ultimately it's the responsibility of a planning process to decide when to invite input from whom.

Both sides assume that the other is more flexible than it is. As a transit planner, I often suggest some adjustment to a development that would make transit vastly more effective, and am told that's not possible. On the other hand, it's routine for a developer to assume that this bus line can just make a deviation to serve a development, without considering either operating cost or the effect on other customers trying to ride through that point. Placemakers' demands that transit be slowed down on a certain segment raise the same issues: operating cost and reduction of a transit line's usefulness for through travel.

In the same "Mars/Venus" spirit, here are a couple of other reasons that this relationship is so hard:

We are literally working in different dimensions: Urban design is mostly about places. Transit planning is about corridors and networks. Transit planning can do little at a single site; transit functions only when you think of a whole long corridor -- made up of many places and situations -- as a unit, and even better when you think of networks comprised of corridors and interchanges. One place where urban design and placemaking can work together with transit planning is at the level of the whole-city network, which is why integrated regional planning of land use and major transit corridors is such a crucial task, one that few North American urban areas even try to do.

We live in different timescales. Urban design is about something that will be built and completed. Transit planning is about eternal operations. Transit planners may seem distracted by the love of building something too, but ultimately, it's all about service, which means operations. So the two sides tend to talk past each other about costs in particular. The urban designer and developer are watching one-time capital cost, but the transit planner cares about eternal operating cost. Developers often throw a little one-time money at a transit service, e.g offering to subsidize the first five years of operation, but the wise transit agency knows that sooner or later, the developer will be gone and this service will become their financial problem, especially if it's a service that they can see is unlikely to perform well.

It was fascinating to watch this discussion, and to be a part of it. Many more useful things were said, and I may pick up on a few of them in future posts. Meanwhile, the first step toward overcoming a divide is to really understand why it is so pervasive, and that requires both sides to think about their deep assumptions, and why different assumptions follow from the nature of the other party's work.

Much of Walker's technical discussions aren't any more riveting than they sound. And yet, it is, on the whole, ... a surprisingly un-tedious exercise in armchair planning. Walker loves and believes in public transit, but his awareness of the costs and tradeoffs render him a shockingly neutral advocate (if such a thing is possible). On the one hand, Walker is trying to encourage stakeholders to advocate for better transit systems. But if you read him closely, you might end up with mental gridlock (while actual gridlock grows all the worse).

I can accept being nonriveting -- this isn't Stephen King -- and am happy to settle for "un-tedious." Otherwise, I treat this critique as a badge of honor. To me as a consultant, few epithets are finer than 'shockingly neutral.' Yes, my book is about helping you and your community think about the real choices that you face. And yes, to make those choices, you in your armchair (and your community in the real transit planning process) must think about what you want, and sometimes about which of two things you want is more important.

I'm sorry if that gives some people "mental gridlock", but functional human beings and communities do this all the time. Everyone understands the process of budgeting when money is at stake. Transit simply requires the similar kind of hard-tradeoff thinking in some other dimensions, including street-space, service priorities, etc. My book also makes budgeting decisions around transit much easier, because it helps everyone understand exactly what they are buying or sacrificing.

Once, years ago, I was working with a community's elected officials to help them reach a consensus on how they want to balance the competing goals of lifeline coverage vs higher ridership. (The former goal produces a little bit of service everywhere and the latter produces a high-intensity network only when demand is high. See Chapter 10.) We were having a contentious public meeting on exactly this subject, with the electeds debating each other and the public inserting a range of useful testimony. The electeds were going to have to vote.

We took a break, I went to the men's room, and suddenly one of the electeds was at the adjacent urinal. He whispered: "Hey Jarrett, I know you don't want to say anything out there, but really, what do you think we should do?"

As a citizen I'd have an answer based on my values, but I wasn't a citizen here. I was here to help a community make its own decision. So my private answer was the same as a public one. "No! This is not a technical question. You have to balance your priorities between two things that you value, just like you do when you're budgeting. This is a chance to express your values, so asking me to tell you what to do is like asking me to tell you who you are."

Obviously, once you've chosen what you want, your consultant will start telling you what's required to deliver that outcome, and in that mode the consultant may sound like an advocate. But that only happens once the client -- you, your community, your electeds -- have stated their desires clearly in an understanding of the tradeoffs they imply.

Sorry. Life's full of hard choices, for people and for their communities. If it gives you mental gridlock, put down the book or step out of the meeting. Breathe fresh air, study a flower, or look at the stars. But sooner or later, you'll decide, or others will do it for you.

How little has changed since the 1830s! From Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in 1835:

Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. The woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. It is not uncommon in crossing the new States of the West to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track.

FTA staffer: Welcome to Washington, Socrates! The literature and philosophy students on our staff can’t stop talking about you, and suggested you could help us think something through. They told us you ask good questions.

Socrates. I hope I can help.

FTA staffer: So we invited you here because we are devising a new way to decide which transit projects are worthy of funding, anything from a little streetcar to a busway to a big subway line.

Socrates: And when you deem that a transit project is good, do you mean that it has some intrinsic goodness in character – perhaps its pleasing color or shape – or do you mean that its goodness lies in providing some benefit to others?

F. In the benefit, certainly. It’s how to describe the benefit that gets us into trouble. Our policy is to focus on mobility and accessibility benefits – basically, people getting where they’re going. But it’s hard to translate that into a measure …

S. You would have to define those terms first.

F. Of course. You see, for a while now we’ve been scoring the benefits of a transit project based on the amount of travel time it saves. Basically it’s person-hours or person-minutes, one person saving one minute of travel time.

S. You mean one person gets to his destination a minute sooner than he would without the project. That’s a person-minute?

F. Pretty much. We prefer to count hours because minutes seem – I don’t know – petty, somehow. But still, you know, people getting there sooner, it seemed like a good idea for years.

S. Tell me: if Jim has $1000, and Dave has $100, and each is given another $100, you would say that the two have benefited equally? Even though Jim's wealth has gone up just 10% while Dave's has doubled?

F. I don’t follow …

S.: Well, but you were counting minutes, right, not percentage savings?

F.: Of course.

S.: So one commuter from the rural fringe whose commute is cut from 80 to 70 minutes … that’s exactly as valuable as one inner city traveller whose trip is cut from 15 to 5 minutes?

F.: Well, yes … I’m beginning to see your meaning …

S: Whereas if you’d thought in percentages …

F. … we’d have valued the inner city trip more … do you mean? …

S. Just asking. Don’t people really perceive travel time changes as percentages? I mean, who would feel their options to be more transformed, and be more likely to change their behavior as a result: someone who’s travel time was cut from 80 to 70 minutes or someone who’s travel time was cut from 15 to 5? Wouldn’t the latter be the greater transformation, more likely to change behavior?

F. I see your point. Of course it’s usually easier for a project to cut 80 to 70 …

S. Of course, so that’s what you end up funding. What’s the consequence of that?

F. And streetcars running in mixed traffic, of course … well, the dirty secret is that they usually don’t cut travel time at all, compared to an “enhanced bus” alternative. They can even make it longer.

S. What’s wrong with scoring streetcars low, then?

F. Well, people are telling us that streetcars in mixed traffic are just intrinsically wonderful, so we should judge them differently. They seem to encourage economic development, and yet they’re not as expensive to build as faster and more reliable transit systems, so cities see them as something that’s within reach. Anyway, we have an economic development factor that tries to keep track of that, but it’s really hard to score based on what a bunch of city boosters and developers tell us about how cool a place will be in 10 years. I mean, we wish them the best, but city boosters and developers are always saying that …

S. Of course. No neutral objective measure. Whereas travel time …

F. You’re right, travel time, for all its faults, was pretty easy to measure, and to calculate for a new project.

S. But you’re abandoning it. So what’s the new scheme?

F. Ridership! Who can argue with that? We care now about how many people are going to ride the thing, especially those who aren’t riding now.

S. Is that a new idea?

F. Well, it’s always mattered somewhat. In my dad’s day we used to score mostly on “cost per new rider,” so then it was the overwhelming factor. Then we were accused of not valuing the time of people who were already riding transit – you know – their travel time savings due to the project. It didn’t count.

S. So you abandoned that, but now you’re going back to it?

F. Not exactly, but …

S. How is the new measure different?

F. We have some other factors, like service to transit dependents …

S. But basically, the new measure is ridership?

F. Right.

S. And apart from your transit dependent clause, all riders are equally valuable? Regardless of how far they ride?

F. Basically.

S. So you’re now biased the other way? Toward the inner city service, which many people ride, and away from the long-distance commute, which serves few people but many passenger-miles, and which will score highest on travel time savings (in minutes, not percentage) because the travel times are so long anyway?

F. Yes, but there are lots of arguments that this is the right bias now. The whole point of sustainable urbanism is to limit sprawl and encourage more compact cities. When we were mostly building commuter rail all the way to the rural fringe, we were encouraging the opposite. In fact, I’ve met people who moved from an inner city condo to a two-acre horse farm solely because a new commuter rail line made it possible.

S. Sounds like the right bias for you, then. But tell me, isn’t the world changing pretty fast right now? I caught up on some of your media in the time machine. It sounds like costs of transportation are shifting rapidly and people in the know expect options to be much different in just a few decades. In fact, fear about the rising cost and impact of transportation is part of why you want people to live closer together, right?

F. Absolutely.

S. Now, when you build something big and expensive like a rail line, you’re not doing it for the benefits tomorrow, right? You’re doing it for benefits further into the future.

F. Forty years at least.

S. Forty years. So if you’re judging the merit of a project based on ridership, that must mean you know what its ridership will be 40 years from now. Do you have many studies from 40 years ago that correctly describe ridership today?

F. Well, so much can happen in 40 years, you really can’t predict …

S. But if you expect forty years of value, shouldn’t you at least be looking at the middle of that window, say 20 years out?

F. Well, I suppose, but that’s really the outer edge of what anyone can predict.

S. In any case, you don’t know about your project’s ridership the way you know about its travel time. You can figure the travel time of a new service pretty exactly, but the ridership … that’s a prediction, right?

F. Of course.

S. So your new policy shifts your focus from a fact to a prediction. Even as you admit that ridership prediction is often wrong on opening day, let alone 20 or 40 years out.

F. But they always get the order of magnitude right! And of course things happen that they couldn't have foreseen. And you know, ridership prediction is always getting better. Experts are always re-calibrating their models, bringing in new factors.

S. What are the calibrations based on?

F. Well, it’s complicated, and kind of mysterious even to me. But the basic idea is that they look at the predictive factors, like travel time and land use and user experience so forth, and find examples where similar factors have led to certain ridership outcomes.

S. In the past.

F. Well, of course in the past. What else do we have?

S. But you just agreed that your world is changing more and more rapidly, which means that a given year is less and less like a year a decade earlier. Doesn’t that mean, logically, that the past is becoming less relevant?

F. Well, we try to use the reasonably recent past.

S. But you need a lot of data points, surely, to calibrate? And if the world is changing faster, doesn’t that mean that the “reasonably recent past” is shrinking? I mean, faster change means that conditions ten years in the future are much more different from the present than conditions ten years ago are. So logically, you can’t look as far into the past as you used to, to calibrate your models.

F. Well of course it fluctuates. But over the long run, I see your point.

S. So aren’t you approaching a condition where you run out of past? Reach a point where the only relevant examples are so recent that they’re only just past opening day, and there simply aren't enough data points in so brief a period?

F. You’re right. Logically it makes no sense at all. But what else would we do?

(Pause.)

S. Well, what’s the purpose of public transit?

F. Oh that’s easy. Public transit delivers a range of benefits that all go toward building a stronger, healthier, and more just America. It is the lifeblood and foundation of cities, which are the engines of the innovation that will keep our country strong and competitive. Public transit serves the cause of environmental and social justice, helping low-income and minority participate in the life of the city, so that they can climb the ladder of success by their own hard work. And of course, it’s all about jobs–-

S. Wait. That’s a lot of purposes! How on earth would you measure all of those things?

F. Well, public transit has lots of benefits! That’s what makes it so essential to a strong, healthy, and just Amer--

S. But I asked about purpose, not benefits. My business, philosophy, has zillions of benefits. You wouldn’t be here without it, and you certainly wouldn’t be thinking this clearly. But philosophy’s purpose is not too hard to capture. Maybe something like “understanding the fundamental nature of existence, and what this may imply for how people should live.” We philosophers argue about the details, but we’re positively unanimous compared to all the ways you describe transit’s purpose.

F. Well, we don’t really use the word purpose much.

S. Tell me, what’s the purpose of the police?

F. Well, law enforcement of course.

S. But policing has lots of benefits! Controlling crime is important for investment, and thus for prosperity. It contributes directly to quality of life, maybe even to happiness. And besides, police do good works for all kinds of community causes. And if you didn’t have police, you wouldn’t have plots for many of the stories that your people find entertaining, from detective novels to forensic dramas! And admit it, don’t ten year old boys find sirens exciting?

F. Yes, policing does all those things. But law enforcement, you know, that’s their real job, isn’t it? They generate all those benefits simply by doing their job, which is law enforcement.

S. Exactly. So it’s not enough to talk about transit’s benefits. You have to think about its purpose, or as you put it, it’s real job.

F. Well, moving people …

S. Anywhere? Around in circles? Is a Ferris wheel public transit?

F. No, I mean to their destinations. Except for tourists and recreational riders maybe. They like to go in circles sometimes.

S. So apart from tourists, transit is about people getting to where they’re going?

F. Sure, that’s the thing transit does I guess. And it does it in shared, scheduled vehicles instead of each one driving alone.

S. Well, we could spend another hour getting down to a definition, but the first thing that comes to your mind is often, in the end, the most useful one. “Moving people,” you said, “to their destinations.”

F. That sounds like a good start.

S. The destination, of course, isn’t really just a place but an intention, right? We want to get to work, to home, to school, to a recreation opportunity.

F. Right. That’s why cool people are talking about access now, not just mobility. Mobility is how far you can move, but access is how much useful stuff you can get to quickly. So transit also has this role of helping things to get built closer together, so that things you need aren’t as far away. That’s called density, but it doesn’t work without transit, so transit helps to stimulate it. So I guess that’s a purpose too.

S. Is that separate purpose of transit? Or just another benefit? In other words, can you serve that purpose best just by making it really easy and fast for people to get where they’re going?

F. Well, the developers and city boosters don’t think so. They think we need a separate measure to capture the way transit might stimulate development, quite apart from its usefulness in getting you places.

S. But developers are merchants, right? They need people to buy their product.

F. Of course.

S. So let’s think about their customer. If you’re deciding whether to live in a transit-oriented place, you’re going to care about the transit, right? It has to be there. It has to be good, right?

F. Right. That’s why transit effectively stimulates development.

S. But what does that customer care about, really? The ability to get where they’re going, right, since that’s transit’s purpose?

F. Of course.

S. So even the development output of transit, as you’re describing it, is ultimately about travel time. How soon you get where you’re going – that’s travel time, right? That’s the thing about transit that would attract people.

F. Well yes, but there are so many other emotional factors that affect people’s choices, right? People just like certain transit technologies, so they use them more.

S. What, for example?

F. Well, streetcars, you know, in mixed traffic. Such a huge political movement. No travel time benefits at all, really, but this huge emotional response. Developers just love them, because their customers do. We figure, by counting ridership, we properly include those factors.

S. Suppose your Parks agency does some improvements to a park, builds some new attractions there, and as a result more people come. Does that mean it’s something you should have funded?

F. Well, no, I mean, we’re a transportation agency.

S. That’s right. In fact, I was reading your “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” in the time machine, and noticed it explicitly says that “mobility and accessibility are the primary benefits of transportation investments.

F. That’s right.

S. So if a project is not delivering those benefits, that doesn’t mean it doesn't provide any benefits, right? It just means it doesn't provide the benefits that your agency is responsible for delivering, so it's not your job to fund it. It could still be funded by others, even other government agencies, the way a new statue in a park might be.

F. Yes, this is the argument that we should value mixed-traffic streetcars exactly the way we value brick paving and planter boxes, as amenities whose purpose is to attract investment. It makes sense, but somehow, because streetcars move, and people can ride them, people insist that we fund them as transit services, even though there's no mobility or access benefit compared to an "enhanced bus" option.

S. Hmm. But again, we’re talking about long-term investments, right?

F. Certainly.

S. So with your ridership metric, you must show that lots of people will be attracted to a streetcar when you open it, even in the absence of travel time savings, and you do that by effectively citing recent examples where streetcars replaced buses and ridership went up, even though the service wasn’t any faster than before.

F. Right. That’s a nice example of the problem with judging projects on travel time.

S. But in addition, because this is a long term investment, you must show that the emotional reaction that is causing this extra ridership is durable over the long term, don’t you? That people will continue to have that preference for streetcars even when streetcars are no longer a novelty, and even as other technologies improve their ability to do the same things?

F. Well, of course, nobody can know that.

S. No, that would certainly be a prediction. But are some predictions maybe more confident than others, purely on philosophical grounds?

F. Well, that’s your department, Socrates.

S. It’s not hard. Your new evaluation system is based on ridership, and we’ve talked now about two causes of ridership. One is various emotional attractions of a vehicle, like the streetcars you mentioned, but the other is travel time -- ridership that is attracted because transit gets people where they’re going quickly. Your models already weigh that, don’t they? They already assume that travel time is a major indicator of ridership?

F. Absolutely, and on very solid grounds. That’s always been true.

S. Truer than you think maybe. If I hire a – well, you might call it a pedicab – to get me across Athens, perhaps because I am late to meeting some friends there, I do it because I’m in a hurry, or more exactly, I want to be at my destination now, because my life is on hold until I do. The young men who run with those carts go much faster than I can walk. I get on with my life sooner, and so they get my ridership.

F. So …

S. So I can assure you that in my home era, 2500 years ago, people already care about travel time. Certainly, a time that we consider fast would strike you as slow. But we want to get to work on our tasks, which require being in certain places. We want to get home to our families. We want to see our friends and get a good seat at the theatre. Our armies want to get to battlefields before their enemies do. So usually, when we set out on those trips, it’s with a desire to be at the destination, to already be doing whatever we were going to do there. Of course, sometimes we pause to smell the flowers, and enjoy the trip, and sometimes we walk around just for pleasure. But most of the time, we need to get there.

F. … and because people have always cared about that, for many centuries, it would seem to have more predictive value! If we have to predict, we should give more weight to factors that have governed ridership more consistently over longer spans of history … Is that what you’re saying?

S. So suppose the project you approve runs for 100 years, as much of your old transit infrastructure has already done …

F. 100 years … Well, I can’t begin to imagine what my great great great grandchildren are going to value when it comes to technology, or even what their choices will be. But you’re right … I’m on firmer ground guessing that they’ll want to get where they’re going, and soon.

S. … which means …

F. Travel time! Damn you, Socrates!

S. So why are you abandoning travel time again?

Pause.

F. Look, I think there’s a deeper problem with travel time. It connects with people when they’re thinking about the trips they make, but it doesn’t connect to – well, city builders, you know? Architects, developers, urban visionaries, and a lot of ordinary citizens who are excited by their ideas. You even have academics and urban designers saying transit should be slower, to encourage people to not travel as far, as though we could ever do that kind of social engineering. How can we keep talking about travel time in the face of all that?

S. Well, then, what’s another way to describe it?

F. Hmm.

S. What do people in your country value? What motivates them?

F. Too many things. You have fresh eyes on it, Socrates, what do you think?

S. We’re in Washington DC. Look around, on the monuments. Or turn on the radio, anywhere in this country it seems.

F. Liberty, you mean. Freedom.

S. People in most countries value freedom, but nobody talks about it as obsessively as Americans do.

F. Well, of course. It was a rallying cry of our revolution, and then of the fight against slavery, and certainly World War II. Longing for freedom, and then more recently a desire to liberate others, drives so much of our history …

S. Well, then, why don’t you base your evaluation method on freedom?

F. You don't mean that freedom boils down to travel time, do you? That would be a hard line to sell.

S. But if people can get places faster …

F. They can get to more places in a given amount of time, so they have more (snaps fingers) … choices!

(Pause. S and F look at each other.)

S. During that infernal time machine ride, I saw some footage of your southwestern cities, which seem to be fleeing from themselves across the desert. And I noticed the same shop everywhere … a “convenience store” you call it. They were advertising that customers had a choice of several flavors of something. But their slogan was, “Americans love the freedom.”

F. Yes, freedom of choice.

S. So faster travel means …

F. Literally more stuff within reach. So more choices. And hence more freedom. Not just choices of flavors or gas stations or convenience stores. It means you have more choices of schools for your children, paths for your career.

S. Those sound like important freedoms, freedoms that people fight for, as we did.

F. Yes!! (Pacing.) You’d have to refine it. But surely, if you can get where you’re going sooner, that means you can get to more places in a fixed amount of time. More of the city is available to you – more jobs, friends, places to shop, unusual things that you value. You can do more of whatever you want to do, which is part of being whoever you want to be. Sheesh! Now I sound like the Education Department! But … but this is transportation’s place in the same crusade, isn’t it?

S. Even in my day, people leave small towns for the city, because there are more options there. Freedom of choice, you’d call it.

S. A map of San Francisco. And you have a Greek word for those blobs …

F. “Isochrones,” yes! We’d never say that word in public, of course, but those blobs show how much of your city you can get to on transit in a given amount of time, depending on where you are. The idea was to help people see the transit mobility consequences of their choices about where to locate. You' move the red pointer, and the blobs would show where you can get to quickly if you locate there. But really … it’s a map of … freedom!

S. So …

F. So, what if our metric was: How much does a project grow these blobs? Reduce travel time, but specifically with the effect of bringing more choices into range for each person, so they have more freedom! Not just the freedom to ride your horse in any direction on a ranch, but the freedom to make real choices, about friends, work, values that arise from the options presented by a city!

S. Grow the blobs in any direction?

F. Of course not, that would be the old model of mobility. It would be about access. Not just square miles of area you can get to, but the amount of stuff in them. Something like “how many new choices – jobs, shopping, schools, houses of worship or philosophy, sports facilities, and so on, are brought within a given travel time of how many people, just because of this proposed project?”

S. One given travel time? What will it be, 17 minutes?

F. (Laughs.) Imagine getting consensus on that! Several travel time thresholds of course. As you pointed out, we care about cutting travel times from 20 to 10 minutes, at least as much as we care about cutting them from 80 to 70 … Or, wait, maybe we care more! Is there a way to do this with percentages, as you suggested …?

S. So why is your agency abandoning travel time as a criterion for selecting projects?

F. (Sighs. Collapses in his chair.) I don’t know, Socrates. It seemed like the thing to do. I have to admit I was never comfortable, and I’d love to chase this idea of freedom as the ultimate measure. But in the end, you know … people really, really love streetcars, even the really slow ones in mixed traffic, and this measure won’t score those very highly! I mean ... Would people really sacrifice streetcars for freedom? In America?

Transit projects, like all government projects, have costs and benefits, so one classic way to evaluate project proposals has been the "Cost/Benefit Analysis" (CBA). Add up all the benefits, add up all the costs, divide benefits by costs and announce the Benefit/Cost Ratio (BCR). If the it's below 1, which means the costs exceed the benefits, you kill the project. The higher the it is, the better the project.

In the Financial Post (part of Canada's National Post), Peter Shawn Taylor argues that the Cost/Benefit Analysis is the best way to evaluate a project, and that bad projects are being advanced by a newfangled thing called Multiple Account Evaluation (MAE). I encourage you to be bored by this dispute, but not before you understand it. Neither of these methods is sufficient to end a passionate argument, and it's important to know why they never will be.

The problem with Cost/Benefit analysis is that it requires you to convert all the costs, and all the benefits, to the same currency. That means you must know, with imperial confidence, the cost in dollars of such things as:

each minute of each customer's time

a particular ecosystem to be destroyed or preserved, which may involve various degrees of endangerment (of species, and of ecosystem types)

historic or cultural resources to be destroyed or relocated, or preserved.

the redevelopment potential of a particular area with or without the project, and the various benefits and costs arising from that potential.

impacts of the project on affordability, and thus on the future shift of disadvantaged persons from one area to another, with a range of social impacts.

benefits of electrification (quiet, no on-site pollution) on a neighborhood's quality of life, which impacts the previous point.

a particular aesthetic impact that makes the city distinctive in a new way, such as a stunning piece of architecture or a new relationship to a unique historic artefact or feature of landscape.

Several of these items require confident prediction of the future, and there is also a vast question of who pays these costs and reaps these benefits. I am not criticizing the vast body of research that has gone into improving the conversion factors that turn all costs and benefits into a dollar value. But unless we really agree on what endangered ecosystems or municipal self-esteem are worth, in dollars, it's reasonable to question whether Cost/Benefit analysis can deliver the last, decisive word on whether a project deserves public investment.

One Canadian solution is the Multiple Account Evaluation (MAE). Different types of benefits and costs are calculated differently and not converted into a common currency. As Taylor describes it:

Developed by the [British Columbia] government in 1993 and now in widespread use, MAE dispenses with a single spreadsheet of advantages and disadvantages and adopts instead numerous separate “accounts:” a financial account, social account, environmental account and so on. In this way, the actual monetary costs and benefits of a project become just one of many issues to be considered.

A similar idea is inherent in the term "triple bottom line," which refers to economic, environmental, and social impacts -- positive and negative -- of a proposal. In either case, you end up with a series of parallel analyses that give different answers from the point of view of different kinds of cost and benefit.

So then what do you do? Taylor quotes emeritus Professor John Shortreed of the University of Waterloo:

“The problem with MAE is that each account is given equal weight,” he observes. “This suggests the billion-dollar cost of the project is no more or less important than any of the other accounts, however trivial.”

It's easy to weight each account equally, because that sounds fair, but of course equal weighting is just as arbitrary as any other weighting, because we're talking about things that are not directly comparable to each other, such as a social cost vs an environmental one. If you could really compare those things, we'd be able to do cost/benefit analysis.

MAE and the "triple bottom line" are useful concepts because they reveal the arbitrariness of weighting. Weighting implies decisions, for example, about the relative importance of social vs environmental impacts. That means the weighting is a value judgment about what matters to us as humans, as a community, as a civilization. Surely we should argue passionately, maybe even irrationally, about that!

The real problem here is that in the interests of consensus, we tend to allow technical analysis to make important value judgments for us, which is to say, we want technical analysis to tell us who we are.

When you hear the terms social benefit, environmental benefit, and economic benefit, which arouses the strongest positive feelings? The answer is an important signal about your deeply-held values and world-view. If a technical analyis is making that decision for you, are you sure it's the analysis you want to trust?

Cost/benefit analysis and Multiple Account Evaluation (or "triple bottom line") both conceal value judgments. Cost/benefit analysis hides value judgments in the factors used to convert various costs and benefits into dollars. MAE or "triple bottom line," by contrast, comes up with multiple ratios -- social vs environmental, for example -- and ends up having to weight them, which is where the judgment appears. I prefer the MAE or "triple bottom line" only becuase it makes the arbitrariness of weighting more visible, and hence pushes the conversation about it closer to the public sphere.

It's understandable that we don't want to compare a billion-dollar pricetag to unquantifiable but powerful benefits that people will weight differently. But the whole idea of the triple bottom line is that (a) we have to make these comparisons and (b) there's no technical basis for an answer. When I'm doing evaluation frameworks of any kind, I look for guidance on the weighting based on locally adopted goals, value statements, or public discussion. If the goals haven't been articulated, I often suggest some public discussion about the weighting itself. (Some evaluation processes do consult the public on weighting, but the question can sound too technical at that point so not enough people pay attention; I think more can be done to make these discussions more vivid and consequential.)

As usual, I don't have the answer, only a refinement of the question. Should communities talk about how to weigh competing values that are in conflict? Or should they let those decisions be made inside a technical process in the guise of analysis? There's a very powerful argument for the latter: decisions get made. It's a lot of work to educate a community enough that it can express its values and desires in a form that a project can implement, even before you impose the other value judgments attached to various funding sources. I don't advocate either position entirely, but have argued the "discuss the values" position because it should be visible as a choice. In many ways, this is the "democracy vs technocracy" debate that we're hearing right now in the context of the European Union. It's a hard question, maybe too hard, but it's one of those great debates worth caring about.

The University of Minnesota's David Levinson wrote a bracing article last week arguing for a new approach to how we decide what transit lines should exist. In its emphasis on "not losing money," it may remind you of some of the broadsides of the anti-transit right, but Levinson is not one of that crowd, as far as I know.

So I thought I'd quote the juiciest parts here, and provide some counterpoint. Levinson and I use very different frames, but if you look beyond those, there's some agreement here.

Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.

This "profitability" or "breaking even" frame may alienate many on the left from the merit of Levinson's idea. Currently, transit agencies are not trying to break even, so they are not failing if they don't. If we propose a free-market view in which transit should be breaking even, well, I'd like to see this as well in a perfect world. But that would be a world in which government isn't heavily subsidizing transit's competitor, the private car -- not just through road expenditures but through such interventions as minimum parking requirements and petroleum-based foreign policy. I would further suggest that current environmental crises argue for government to be biased away from the private car and toward modes that do less environmental harm, and that subsidies toward transit (i.e. accepting that transit "loses money") are one valid way of doing that.

We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:

Always be suspicious when a transit network is analyzed as though it were a pile of routes, because a good network is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the "core".

These tend to be of two types: commuter express routes that run only when they're very busy, and all-day high-frequency lines in dense urban cores with all-day demand. In my work, I describe these services as having a "Ridership Goal" or "Productivity Goal."

2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the "feeders".

Levinson is acknowledging here that it's not actually possible to classify all lines cleanly, because in a well-designed transit network designed for anywhere-to-anywhere travel it is the network that yields ridership, not just individual services. It appears Levinson wants to distinguish a set of lines as individually unprofitable but necessary for the overall profitability of a network -- as opposed to the third category below. OK, but this is the same as saying that there is no meaningful line-by-line measurement of "profitability" in an interdependent network; only the entire network (except for the weakest services discussed below) can be judged as profitable. That's true in my experience.

3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them "equity" routes.

Many people don't want to talk about this category, but these routes exist in any network. They tend to be circulator services in low-density areas -- including rural areas -- that provide lifeline access but have little or no potential to compete with the car. You can identify them because they don't contribute substantially to the performance of the main network (though this is of course a matter of degree with no hard edge).

If an hourly circulator carrying 5 boardings per hour connects with a major trunkline carrying 100 boardings per hour, and half the circulator's ridership makes a connection with the trunk, then at worst deleting the circulator (and losing all its ridership) would cost the trunk 2.5% of its 100 hourly boardings, which will barely be noticed. If the service spent on the circulator were spent instead on even more frequency on the trunk, you might well make up the difference.

On the other hand, if the trunk weren't there, the circulator would lose 50% of its boardings, probably a fatal blow. So while connecting lines are always interdependent, some are so weak that the relationship might as well be viewed as a one-way dependence.

Levinson's right about all that, but since I don't share his "profitability" frame I can't share his derision about "welfare" or "equity." In working with transit agencies, I try to educate about these "Coverage" routes, the equivalent of Levinson's third group. I define these as "predictably low-ridership services motivated by goals other than ridership -- goals generally including social service objectives, expectations of "equity" between different subareas of the region, and a generalized desire to cover the whole service area with some kind of service." In my work, I encourage public transit authorities to make a conscious choice about how much of this service they want to operate, understanding that every dollar they spend on Coverage service is a dollar they can't spend on Ridership goals or related outcomes of mode share and fare revenue.

So given Levinson's "profitability" frame, here's his solution:

Mass (or public) transit agencies are transportation organizations first, not welfare organizations. They should be considered public utilities rather than departments of government, which provide a useful service for a price to their users.

The conflct between Ridership and Coverage goals needs to be resolved by government. This doesn't require removing transit authorities from government, as there are many needs (especially land use integration) that argue the opposite. Even if transit operations were considered a "utility," policy and planning functions of transit very much need to be part of government, in my experience. Many Australian states, for example, gave away too much policy and planning control to operating companies, and are now undergoing reforms to take this authority back.

My thesis is that the local transit systems should identify and propose to retrench to the financially sustainable system, and present local politicians with a choice.

If local politicians want additional "equity" services, they should be presented with a cost of subsidy per line, and then can collectively choose which lines to finance out of general revenue, as this is primarily a welfare rather than an transportation function. In other words, public transit organizations would present the public with a bill for these money-losing services (the subsidy required in order to at least break even on operating them (i.e. the difference between their revenue and their cost), and not be expected to pay for them out of operating revenue.

If the cost of those lines is deemed too expensive (i.e. the politicians are unwilling to pay for them with general revenue tax dollars), they should be canceled. Transit agencies would no longer be losing money, they would now be break-even or slightly profitable. They might even pay a dividend to their owners (the general public).

General revenue (the treasury) would of course now be losing money, we didn't pull money from thin air, but since this is a social welfare/redistribution function, that is perfectly appropriate. This would entirely change public and political perception of transit services. It might also result in fewer bad routes being funded, since it would be crystal clear where the subsidies lay.

Levinson's tone here is needlessly divisive in my view. I prefer to work from a position of respect toward the users and defenders of low-ridership services, understanding that other valid public purposes are being served. I also respect the notion that a community that pays into a transit system should expect some service in return; this "equity" impulse has nothing to do with "welfare."

But Levinson is right that a choice must be made. There really are two competing goals for transit: Ridership (which leads to high mode share, sustainability outcomes, and "profitability") and Coverage (which provides social inclusion and equity benefits in low-density areas that a Ridership-based system wouldn't serve.) These two goals lead network design in opposite directions. So transit agencies should have guidance -- from those who fund them -- on how much to spend on one goal or the other.

I agree with Levinson, too, that transit policy would be much clearer if we had budgets definitely allocated to the purpose of maximum ridership -- with other budgets that funded the Coverage services.

For more, see this paper of mine on the same topic, and Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book.

You can always construct a wise one-liner by dividing the richness of urbanism into two opposing boxes. This move is most interesting to me when done by someone I admire, for purposes that I largely share. The great Cascadian writer Jonathan Raban, for example:

"The ... soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps [and] in statistics ...”

Yes, the importance of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare always needs to be stressed if you feel that your city is being run by statisticians. But it's still a false and misleading dichotomy, as almost all dichotomies are. We often need dichotomies as crutches, but when they get too easy, it's time to let them go.

Maps are full of illusion, myth, aspiration and nightmare. We may think of them as technical, and we can argue for the value of replacing illusion with information. But as Mark Monmonier devotes a famous book to explaining, maps always distort for some purpose. The aspirations that drove the settlements and conquests that created today's "New World" were unimaginable without maps -- maps designed to inform the conquerer but also to encourage his illustions and aspirations.

Anxiety about statistics, on the other hand, is a masking of the real problem, which is a confusion about the location of goals and ideas of the good. Statistics and maps tell us about facts of life, and you can't go anywhere with your aspirations if you can't deal with the present reality. We all have to start where we are.

Statistics, math, and maps also tell us something about the limits of aspiration. You may aspire to a city where the circumference of a circle is only twice its diameter, because this may open up wonderful possibilities for the ideal city. When the mathematicians respond that the circumference of a circle will always be 3.14 times the diameter, it's easy to dismiss them as "statisticians," or to use a common urbanist stereotype, "engineers" who can't engage with vision.

Inside Raban's epigram, and also inside the quotation from the last post, is the confusion of why and how. "Why" we do things and want things must ultimately lie in the space of "illustion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare." (Even the balance-sheets of developers express such motives.) To get what we want, however, we have to interact with reality, and statistics and math do contain some important information about reality, as does our lived experience.

If we could ever separate why from how, we'd save a lot of time, a lot of rage, and move forward much more quickly in thinking and acting about cities. We might suppress some great literature, but a writer as great as Jonathan Raban would turn his mind to the subtler issues that remain.

We all have too much to read, so here's a tip to save time. Whenever any article (such as this one) cites information about incorporated US cities as a basis for any claim about trends in the culture, quit reading. US big-city boundaries are irrelevant to most people's lives, and to anything else that matters about our culture, economy, or destiny.

Christopher Leinberger makes this point in a New Republic article recently, usefully expanded on by Sarah Goodyear at Grist. Leinberger argues that "city" and "suburb" is no longer a useful opposition, and that what really matters are walkable urban places vs drivable suburban ones. True enough, but replacing city with it's near-synonym urban doesn't take us far. "City" and "suburb" are rich, evocative, and succinct words. The word city in particular must be fought for, redefined in ways that defend its profound cultural heritage. The word has an ancient and clear lineage from Latin, one that forms the basis for the word citizen, not to mention civic and civilization.

Greek and Roman political theory was all about the city, in a sense of that word that we can recognize today: groups of people living together in a small space for reasons of security and economy, but also the site of humanity's cultural and intellectual development. City is a word of enormous evocative power to capture a range of ideas that drive urbanism. Leinberger himself can't describe what really matters without using the word urban, which evokes a similar history and resonance.

What Leinberger is really complaining about are discussions of data about incorporated US cities, which are a very narrow and specific problem. A few of the oldest US cities (San Francisco, St. Louis) have coherent boundaries that describe real cultural and demographic units, but many are bizarre shapes of purely historical interest.

Nobody who understands the lived experience of Los Angeles would claim that the City of Los Angeles is a useful or interesting demographic unit. While the city excludes a great deal of dense inner-city fabric close to downtown, it has long balloonlike tentacles extending north to take in the whole San Fernando Valley and also south to grab the port of San Pedro. It also contains a good deal of near-wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The tentacular, pockmarked, pulsating blob that we call the City of Los Angeles is the map of a long-ago war over water and power. The only people who care about it today are those who work for city government or serve as its elected officials, plus a few who've considered city taxes and services as a reason to locate in the city or out of it.

Americans should notice, too, that bizarre and misleading city boundaries are largely a US phenomenon. Europe, Australia, and New Zealand generally allow central (state or national) governments to draw the boundaries of their local governments, so these boundaries usually (not always) end up making some kind of sense. (With the exception of Queensland, Australian local government areas are too small to have much influence, but that's a different problem.)

As Leinberger says, we need a distinction between walkable urban communities and drivable suburban ones, and American city limits are useless for understanding that distinction. But the word city -- whose Latin ancestor meant "walkable urban" for millennia until about 1950 -- is still worth fighting for. Legal US "city limits" are an imperfect and aspirational approximation of what cities really are, and what they really mean for the human project. Despite their pedantic misuse by the likes of Cox and Kotkin, city limits have no authority to tell us what a city is, and why we should want to live in a real city or not. The deep attractions and repulsions that we feel for big cities are the key to a longer and truer cultural understanding of what cities are, and of why the civic is the root of civilization.

To bypass the rage and righteousness around an issue, and move toward solving it, we first have to convince ourselves that solving it is impossible.

That's the thesis of Andrew Sullivan's piece today, "Why the Healthcare Question is Insoluble." He's talking about healthcare in the US context, but few countries have achieved widespread contentment on the issue. I'm not sure you can expect widespread contentment on an issue that requires thinking about sickness and death, at least not at humanity's current level of spiritual development.

My work on transit policy has always come from the same existential position that Andrew lays out. Like every family working out its budget, societies have to make choices between different things that they value. As in healthcare, arguments about these choices often use pre-emptive appeals to compassion or justice to shift our attention away from the the real choice. Government actions that are "compassionate" or that address "civil rights" seem to be responding to an absolute standard of goodness and truth, but often, they still cost money, possibly more money than any government can expect to spend.

I'm very glad to be in transit instead of healthcare, because a few hours debating healthcare makes transit problems look easy. Easy, but still impossible.

But once you lay out those questions, you have to pause and see that by their nature, there's no answer that everyone will like. There may not even be an answer that a majority will like. And in that sense, the task of resolving the issue is impossible.

The geometry of transit tells us that each of these choices gives us a spectrum of possibilities. A transit network can go to the extreme of relying on connections, and thus minimizing complexity, or it can go to the extreme of avoiding connections, which maximizes complexity, but every time you move toward one desired outcome, you move away from another one. That's how a spectrum works. And you can appeal to "civil rights" or "compassion" or "common sense" or "the needs of working families" as much as you want; those appeals may prod policymakers to move one way or the other, but they don't change the geometry. In fact, they're dangerous to the degree that they encourage us not to notice what has to be sacrificed to move in the direction that the speaker advocates.

My experience with many transit agencies is that everyone is a little scared of stating these questions in such a simple way, because it means you really have to answer them. And answering them requires accepting, with some humility, that any possible decision will leave many people outraged. Faced with the courage that this requires, it's tempting to retreat into the confusion. It's tempting to want the issue to be complicated so that you'll never be called to account for making a clear, stark choice of this over that -- even though true leadership lies exactly in the willingness to make those choices. So when an issue seems complicated, we always need to ask, "what interests are being served by the sheer complexity of this issue?" "Can the issue actually be made simple?"

I'm not sure that can be done for healthcare, but bravo to Andrew Sullivan for trying. I am pretty sure it can be done for many of the main debates in transit policy, and that's the core of my work right now.